How to shake a cocktail

Three things happen at once, and knowing which is which tells you when to stop.

• Chilling. Ice moving through liquid transfers heat fast. This is the quickest of the three and it is largely done within ten seconds.
• Dilution. Ice melts into the drink, and a shaken cocktail is designed around a specific amount of water. Under-shaking leaves a drink that tastes harsh; over-shaking leaves it thin.
• Aeration and texture. The violence breaks tiny ice fragments off and forces air into the liquid. This is why a shaken sour has a head and a stirred drink does not, and it is the part most home shakers under-deliver on.

Because chilling finishes first and texture builds last, the common failure is stopping too early - a cold, thin, flat drink. Frost on the outside of the tin is the cue that all three have had time.

Shake along the long axis of the tins, not in a small circle. The ice needs to travel the full length of the vessel and hit each end; a wristy shake keeps it in the middle and does very little.

Point the large tin away from you and slightly upward over your shoulder. This is partly etiquette and partly insurance: if a seal fails, the contents go past you rather than onto you.

Hold both tins. One hand on the large tin near the base, the other capping the small tin, thumb over the end. A pair that is properly seated will not separate, and holding it as though it might is what produces a timid shake.

Hard, not long, is the rule. Twelve seconds of genuine violence beats thirty seconds of polite agitation, and the extra eighteen seconds only adds water.

Sometimes the answer is honestly no. If your shaken drinks taste right but the texture is gritty, the strainer is the culprit, not the shake - a loose spring lets ice fines through. If the drink is cold but weak, you probably shook a properly built drink for too long.

But if your tins leak down your wrist, or seal so hard you have to run them under hot water, that is gear and no technique will fix it. An unmatched pair's fit is a coincidence. Why shaker tins stick and leak diagnoses it, and best weighted shaking tins is the fix.

And if your drinks are inconsistent from night to night, the shake is rarely the variable. That is almost always free-pouring, which is what how to use a jigger is about.

For a drink with egg white, shake once without ice first - a dry shake - to build the foam, then add ice and shake again to chill. Without the dry shake the protein never emulsifies properly and the head collapses within a minute.

A reverse dry shake flips the order: shake with ice, strain the ice out, then shake the cold liquid again without it. It generally produces a denser, longer-lasting head, at the cost of an extra straining step and a colder second shake that is harder work.

A whip shake is a short shake with a single small piece of ice, used for drinks that will be served over crushed ice and would otherwise arrive over-diluted. It chills and mixes without adding much water, because the water is coming from the crushed ice in the glass.